1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image transformation device, more particularly to a method and device for transforming 2D images into 3D.
2. Description of the Related Art
With advances in communications and image processing technology, various forms of media contents are being produced. 3D contents are no exception, and a great amount of activity can be seen in the production of 3D contents. A 3D content is generally obtained using a separate camera, such as a stereoscopic camera, that is capable of acquiring depth information for an image. A content obtained with a regular camera does not provide the depth information for the image and thus cannot be displayed in a 3D form.
With increasing demands for 3D contents, there is now also a demand for 3D incarnations of existing contents that were previously produced in a 2D form. As such, there has been continuous research on methods for transforming an existing 2D image into a 3D image.
Since a 2D image does not include depth information, the depth information has to be inferred from the 2D image. Research efforts have thus been focused on ways to infer depth information.
Existing research for inferring depth information from a 2D image has mainly utilized a method of pre-storing considerable amounts of reference images and then inferring the depth information by searching for a reference image that has a similar color set as that of the inputted image.
As this approach entails individually analyzing a considerable amount of reference images, the processing speed can be very slow, and a considerably large amount of memory capacity may be required.